Broad Host Range Plasmids

From 2018 to 2020 I was under the mentorship of Dr. Lauren Brooks as one of her research students. Together we have been working on a continuation of her paper Where the plasmids roam: large-scale sequence analysis reveals plasmids with large host ranges.. The Goal of the research to show previous findings in a laboratory setting. This project has lacks demonstrable results, this however not due to the experiment being a failure. The first year and a half of the research was devoted to getting funding and getting results. Our PCR methods initially weren’t working and required many months of fine tuning. As a result I am very adept at PCR, Electrophresis, and DNA extraction as I have done it dozens of times. The experiment did start receiving results early this year . However because of the Covid-19 pandemic the lab has been shutdown and the results I did have are on a campus computer I do not have access to because of the ongoing pandemic.

Now that my graduation nears and from my understanding UVU campus will remain closed. My work with the research ends, and all results now belong to Dr. Brooks and Utah Valley University. I wish I had more to show but unfortunately I do not. I believe that Dr. Brooks is still pursuing research into this matter so if you wish to get updates you can contact her. I am also happy to discuss the events and my involvement of the research we conducted.


Mycology Survey of Utah

During the 2019 Fall Semester a student research team composed of Heather Moon, Alex Jones, Clayton Rawson, Kristina Nolff, and myself performed a Mycology Survey of Utah under Dr. Geoffrey Zahn’s mentorship. Together we gained funding to perform a survey of mycological species in Utah, we cultured 72 samples across all the environments of utah. Of those 72 cultures we found substantial DNA evidence of 15 unidentified species. The results were then presented along with Dr. Zahn’s other research team’s results at Utah Valley University to both faculty and students. Though the work wasn’t published nor the project continued. This was decided as categorizing any one of the species would be approximately one year of work and the team was mostly seniors or graduating students.